The Waterboys, Friday July 20th.
Event
- Title:
- The Waterboys, Friday July 20th.
- When:
- Fri, July 20, 2012
- Doors:
- 18:30 h
- Where:
- Iveagh Gardens - Dublin
- Act:
- The Waterboys
- Tickets:
- Find Tickets
Description
The Waterboys,
& special guests:
The Unthanks
& Katie Kim,
The Iveagh Gardens.
Clonmel Street (off Harcourt St), Dublin 2
Friday July 20th, Gates 6.30pm.
The Waterboys Stage Times :
18.45-Katie Kim
19.30-The Unthanks
21.00-The Waterboys
Aiken Promotions are proud to announce the special guests for The Waterboys concert at Dublin’s Iveagh Gardens on Friday July 20th. Mike Scott’s crew will be joined by critically acclaimed Northumberland harmony-folk ensemble The Unthanks.
Described by the Guardian as “Haunting, original and magnificent” the family-oriented group centred around the Unthanks sisters Becky and Rachel and the latter’s composer husband Adrian McNally are renowned for their stunning live shows composed of strings, brass, piano, dancing and otherworldly vocal harmonies. “Supernaturally ancient and defiantly modern” said the Observer’s Paul Morley.
At their last concert in Ireland The Unthanks performed a set of material each by Antony & Johnsons and Robert Wyatt at Vicar Street. Wyatt himself said of them "They are like the morning dew that hasn't steamed off yet, they are fresh and new and I really don't think they know how good they are.”
Opening the show is Katie Kim from Waterford, a full-time member of The Waterboys live band now herself. She has just released her latest album Cover & Flood. The Irish Times described it as: “exceptionally delicate and fragile, wafting around like trails of broken spider-webs… the songs, are gems that urge you to listen to them over and over again.”
After the fantastic reviews for The Waterboys’ An Appointment with Mr Yeats, and their recent sold out European tour, the band have just confirmed a headline performance at the Iveagh Gardens, Dublin on Friday July 20th with very special guests to be confirmed.
The mid-19th century rustic landscaped gardens possess a magic, almost imaginary presence in Dublin’s city centre. It seems like a fitting location for a celebratory occasion, for a band so intrinsically connected to the city and the country at large. Some 51 musicians have treaded the boards with The Waterboys over the last three decades but one man has been central, Edinburgh-born Mike Scott; spiritual adventurer, pop-poet, an arch-wordsmith whose freewheeling instincts have kept off the beaten tracks to global stardom but always in pursuit of artistic greatness.
Scott formed The Waterboys in 1983 and they quickly became famous for their powerful live performances and majestic alternative rock albums. The debut eponymous album, incorporated the influences of folk, rock & roll spiritualism and literary forces in the edgy environment of post-punk. Straight off the bat, Melody Maker’s Robin Gibson proclaimed it as “music of massive and sympathetic depth, and the breadth of the sound is stunning.”
The band’s first classic album, A Pagan Place, followed straight after, expanding themes of the mystic power of nature. Scott’s brilliant metaphorical poetry never succumbed to lyrical corniness and the band’s powerful brass-infused rock racket, laced throughout with Anthony Thistlethwaite screeching sax, sounded like no one else around.
“Supposed superlatives might suggest a Springsteen, a Dylan or, a Bunnymen… innovative, magnificent and essential” declared Melody Maker once again. “Like a punk bursting into Van Morrison’s mystic with six strings blazing, Scott has made a kind of black-leather-jacket version of Astral Weeks,” offered David Fricke of Rolling Stone.
Completing the triumvirate of what is now referred to as their “big music” period (the term taken from a song-title on A Pagan Place) This Is The Sea set the Waterboys up for international acclaim and success, Scott stretching his lyrical abilities and fearless cerebral noise even further than before. “This is big music: as broad and bottomless as the ocean, with masses of guitars and the promise of redemption in the image of a train a-coming,” said Rolling Stone.
“As a modern-day electric William Blake, Scott succeeds where others fail because his love for life is intuitive, never forced. Who else could so nonchalantly throw both caution and inhibition to the winds with such colourful couplets as ‘Unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers, trumpets, towers and tenements, wide oceans full of tears,’” wrote an ecstatic Matt Smith in Melody Maker.
After the recruitment of Irish fiddle maestro Steve Wickham, and a move away from London to Ireland for Mike Scott the band created their million-selling album Fisherman's Blues, on which Scott's original and unusual songwriting was merged with older musics - country, trad, blues and gospel - to electrifying effect. “Quite simply the finest album of this, or perhaps any year” said Melody Maker’s Matt Smith, and he wasn’t alone. The album represents a soundtrack to a time and a place for a whole generation of music lovers. "I was in love with Ireland,” Scott, himself, says of the time. “Every day was a new adventure, it was mythical... Being part of a brotherhood of musicians was a great thing in those days, with all the many musicians of all stripes we befriended in Ireland. I still have that connection to the Irish musicians and tap into it…”
Scott continued his Irish adventure for several more years with the Room To Roam album, also recorded in the hide-away paradise of Spiddal, Co Galway, before disbanding the line-up to pursue a harder rock sound once again. Scott engaged in more sporadic periods of recording and touring over the next decade, spending extended time in the spiritual and holistic community of Findhorn in Scotland as well as spells in London and New York before eventually returning to Dublin. The band’s most recent release is An Appointment with Mr Yeats, which is an ambitious and brilliant musical interpretation of the words of W. B. Yeats who Scott so brilliantly adapted on The Stolen Child on Fisherman’s Blues back in 1987. The new Yeats album was premiered live at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2011.
The current Waterboys line-up as will be featured at Iveagh Gardens sees Mike Scott and Steve Wickham together again as well as the addition of Waterford songstress Katie Kim.
Tickets on sale Thursday May 10th @ 9am priced €44 (including booking fee) from www.ticketmaster.ie and Ticketmaster outlets nationwide. 0818 719 300 - Republic of Ireland customers // 0844 277 4455 - Northern Ireland customers // 00353 1 456 9569 - International customers.
